Ein schönes Paar- a Handsome Couple by Gert Loschuetz

I hadn’t come across Gerd Loschütz before but was curious about this book after hearing it reviewed on the Büchermarkt podcast and recommended by the proprietor of the Botnanger Buchladen, my favourite German indie bookshop . It was said to be about a photographer trying to piece together his parents’ lives from photographs and his own memories- and trying to understand how they ended up separated yet living in the same town in old age. As someone who’s been spending quite some time recently poring over old family photographs, willing them to speak to me, to tell me their stories, this seemed a promising read. Even more so as the love story/family drama takes place against the background of a post war divided Germany and the family fleeing the East for the West.

The eponymous  handsome couple meet and settle in East Germany after the war. Georg was  an officer in the German army, Herta a fashion conscious dress shop assistant with the looks of a model. After making enquiries about working in the West, Georg runs the risk of being arrested and flees East Germany for the West to avoid this. Herta and their son, the narrator, follow on afterwards. There, further bad luck befalls them and Georg, having committed a relatively minor theft, is accused of stealing a far larger amount and finishes up in prison. When he returns, Herta leaves the family and is then absent for many years, sending occasional postcards to her son but giving very little away about where she’s living and avoiding all contact with Georg. Even when they are in the same town at the end of their lives, they have nothing to do with one another- or so it seems until a discovery made by the narrator at the end of the novel.

This is not a conventional linear narrative. The novel starts with Georg’s funeral, followed closely by that of Herta, which leads the narrator to reflect and look back over their lives, relating scenes and incidents prompted by photographs and memories. I had no problem with this fragmentary, episodic approach, but the narration is entirely from the point of view of the son and so Herta and Georg remain rather two dimensional and at times I found the detailed physical descriptions of the handsome couple a little repetitive. (Perhaps some photos would have made them come alive? Alright, I know they’re not real people and maybe this author doesn’t want to play with the notion of fiction like Gabriel Vasquez, but still I longed for a photo at times). It also made it hard to feel much for them or their situation-I didn’t particularly believe in their grand passion. I wanted to know more about them and their motivation-where was Herta all that time and why did she say so little in her postcards? We never find out.

I found the narrator as a child strangely unemotional as well. He relates his mother ‘s absence, surely very traumatic for a child in the 1950s, and his solitary life with an uncommunicative father in a flat, matter of fact tone. I wanted him to react to the father’s silence (that Schweigen which seems such a feature of 20th century inter generational relationships, as in Paula or die Königin schweigt ), to express anger, frustration or misery. Still, this lack of emotion in the child is contrasted in a couple of powerful scenes with the adult narrator. The first is shortly after the funerals and describes the effects of grief: the disorientation, the feeling of being cut off from others talking by a sound proof wall, wandering concentration. The fear that he’s suffering from the same symptoms as his father. And then the chapter towards the end when he visits both parents in old age- his father’s delight at seeing him, yet the limitation of their conversation, his mother leaning her cheek on his hand when he touches her shoulder. I found these last scenes intensely moving and authentic: they seemed to come from the heart whereas there seemed to me a lack of heart in the central relationship between Herta and Georg.

Weaving through the story and providing a foil for Herta and Georg’s relationship is the narrator’s friendship with Mila. She’s a friend, a former lover and a confidante, someone with whom the narrator can share his discoveries and theories about his parents and we see fragments of this friendship over many years too.  Their warm and open exchanges in dialogue contrast with the silence overlaying the narrator’s childhood and I experienced them as a real relief, glad to be back in the modern, contemporary world and away from those inscrutable and elusive parents.

I’ve focused very much here on the family memories and relationships. The novel does also give us a flavour of living in those post war years, both in the communist east and the west. I really enjoyed the account of the family holiday at the communist holiday camp- the Ferienheim des FdGB- where the excitement and novelty of this great week by the seaside is thrillingly conveyed. And Gert Loschütz’ s narrator, a photographer, is able to conjure up vibrant images of many characters with his great eye for detail. Yet the problem for me was that the handsome couple only really came alive towards the end of the novel: before that I couldn’t quite believe in them.